Elena Izcue’s *Peruvian Art in the School* (1926) — The Public Domain Review

Though the introductory texts and excerpted reviews of El arte peruano generally reference “Inca art”, the majority of its designs were inspired by works from other, earlier cultures. A parade of mice appears to be inspired by Nazca ceramics, whereas an arch-backed feline resembles figures from Paracas or Chancay weaving. The motifs are abstracted from their original contexts, with no information provided on their symbolic meaning or what the objects they were drawn from would originally have been used for. This flattening, as Natalia Majluf and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden argue, presents the pre-Hispanic world not as a tapestry of cultures that by turns flourished and faded, banded together and made war, but as a single homogenous mass. As a result, it was easier to rhetorically package the modern Peruvian state — ethnically diverse and emerging from bitter territorial disputes with its neighbors — as unified and eternal, the true heir of Tawantinsuyu. Izcue, herself a former schoolteacher, is explicit in her desire to provide children not only with an artistic education but a civic one: invoking instructors’ “patriotic sentiments”, Izcue’s preface expresses the hope that her workbooks will inspire “a strong nationalism, serious and fertile, that today’s teachers have the sacred obligation to foster”.